September 22, 2010

  • Unlocking the Torah Text, A Review

    Shmuel Goldin, Unlocking the Torah Text; An In-Depth Journey into the Weekly Parsha, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem, 2010, Hardcover, 284 pp.  ISBN: 978-965-229-450-0l $29.95

    [rate: 4 of 5]

    This book is the third volume of a growing Jewish commentary set by the author, Shmuel Goldin.   This volume was written with the partnership of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, and it carries the Imprimatur of the OU.  This Imprimatur gives it the weight of the commanding right of that Congregation as authoritative.

    Disclaimers are an intrusion, but necessary part of any book review; and here is mine.  I come to this reading and review as a conservative Southern Baptist pastor, and not as an unobjective reader or Jewish observant.  I still found certain points in common between us.

    I am glad to see several things in Rav Goldin’s writing. First, he wrote as a Rabbi in his congregation, both locally and within his Congregation; this makes it useful to me as a preacher. Second, he held a high view of Torah’s authority as having Divine authorship; he perceived Torah as truth with real events “that happened to real people,” and their stories “are not fables.”  This was a welcome discovery in his stated approach and a welcome observation in his writing.  Third, “No part of the text or is contents are off-limits to our search.”  Rav Goldin allowed the text to carry its own argument.  And, finally, he dealt with the straightforward explanation of the text, and also with the commentaries on the text.[1] Because of his approach to the text, there is a common conservatism that obviates the need to reprove the author for dealing falsely with the Word of God.

    The book used a series of Hebraisms in its text without explanation: Vayikra, korbanot, Bereishit, Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yakkov, pshat, smicha, and others.  I was able to get a general meaning of these names and words from the context, others were revealed from dictionaries.  This indicated to me that although the book was written in English, it was written for an audience educated in Judaism, but not the Hebrew language.  The only Hebrew was in the chapter titles, the rest of the Yiddish and Hebrew words were transliterated into English.

    Rav Goldin’s dealing with the difficulty of the text at even the sentence level was worthy of a scholar.  He addressed singulars and plurals, and redundancy of the wording in the text as he dealt with the meaning of the words and the context they formed.  The effect of the wording on the meaning of the text was thus demonstrated.

    Each chapter had portions titled as Context, Questions, Approaches, and Points to Ponder.  Each chapter also had interesting titles that drew the reader into the text to interact with it, “The Anatomy of a Sentence,” “Only a Mistake?,” “The Leadership Quandary,” and so forth.  The author related a personal story in the “Points to Ponder” closing of the first chapter that was revealing of his view of and relationship to Christians.  In telling about a meeting with a group of Korean Christian pastors many years ago, he referred to them as Fundamentalist Christian pastors, implying that he is not a Fundamentalist Jew.  Rav Goldin acknowledged Judaism’s fundamental problem, but did not answer it: the loss of the sacrificial system with the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.  Rav Goldin correctly stated the doctrinal position of the pastors as the atoning plenary substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus (though he did not use those words), but dismissed their answers to his problem by directing them to the educational and symbolic nature of the sacrificial system.  Still, he did acknowledge that the restoration of the Temple and the sacrificial system as central in many of the prayers of his Congregation(s).  He then wondered if the members of his synagogue would have been able to answer the pastor’s questions.

    The author included twenty-nine pages of “Sources,” in which he explains who the authorities he cited were and their contribution to the work.  There was also a nine page index to the text which allows the reader to locate topics across the chapters.  There was not, however, a traditional scholarly bibliography, or end notes, or footnotes.  If there were one thing I could recommend to the author, it would be these scholarly tools.  Not as important, but a welcome addition, would be the addition of a readers ribbon so readers could easily mark where they left off reading.

    I hope to secure the first two volumes written by Rabbi Shmuel Goldin for myself, they will be valuable additions to my personal pastoral library.

     

     

    [1] Goldin, Shmuel,: Unlocking the Torah Text; An In-Depth Journey into the Weekly Parsha. Jerusalem, Israel: OUPress; Gefen Publishing House, 2010, pp. xviii-xix.